Is There a Gay Basis To Nietzsche's Ideas?

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Published: July 6, 2002

Does it matter that Nietzsche's landlady in Turin once peeked through his keyhole and saw him dancing stark naked? Or that Nietzsche put an end to one young woman's romantic intentions by presenting her with a toad wrapped in a blood-stained handkerchief? Or that Richard Wagner spread rumors that Nietzsche suffered from the side effects of excessive masturbation and, perhaps, pederasty? Or that Nietzsche may have enjoyed several weeks of homoerotic bliss in Sicily?

Such questions have become familiar in recent decades as the sexual manners, peccadilloes and political affiliations of artists, philosophers and scientists have been scrutinized -- the perfections of the work seen through the imperfections of the life; the products of genius psychoanalyzed, disenchanted, dismantled.

But when attention is turned to Nietzsche, as it is in ''Zarathustra's Secret: The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche'' by Joachim Köhler -- published first in German in 1989 and now in Ronald Taylor's English translation (Yale University Press, $29.95) -- these sorts of excavations into the private life have returned to their roots: Nietzsche insisted that ideas develop not out of the antiseptic workings of reason but out of the blood and breath of their creators.

''Gradually it has become clear to me,'' Nietzsche wrote in 1886, ''what every philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.'' In Nietzsche's case, the confession and memoir are out in the open, so much so that his philoso phy has occasionally been dismissed, the way an intimate friend once put it, as ''nothing other than a brilliant exercise in self-presentation and self-revelation.''

So is Nietzsche's philosophy really no more than a coded confession of secret experiences? Hardly, as can readily be seen from another recent book, Rüdiger Safranski's ''Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography'' (W. W. Norton, $29.95). In fact, Nietzsche's intellectual influence for a century and a quarter has been remarkable because he had so many ideas, at least some of which touched crucial cultural nerves.

Now Mr. Köhler is touching one as well; he is preoccupied with one great ''secret'' that he says dominated Nietzsche's life. That secret is homosexuality, which has always hovered around the margins of Nietzsche's reputation. Mr. Safranski, for one, does not dismiss the hypothesis but is skeptical of its fashionable prevalence.

Indeed, books and essays proving a famed figure's homosexuality have become commonplace. They can be obsessively overwrought and overreaching, as Mr. Köhler's often is. But they also sometimes reveal an unexamined aspect of personality or disclose the passions that lay behind certain works or show how ideas about sexuality affect other human activities. As Nietzsche wrote, ''The degree and kind of a man's sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.''

On the surface, Nietzsche's life is unremarkable. The son of a Lutheran pastor, Nietzsche's genius led to his appointment as a professor of philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24. But chronically riven by illness, whipped by waves of euphoria and despair, Nietzsche resigned his position in 1879 and began a nomadic writing life, until madness overtook him in 1889. During his sane life, only about 500 copies of all his books were sold. Yet he believed that in his work ''the questions of millennia have been resolved.''

Gradually others agreed. Richard Strauss wrote an effulgent tone poem based on Nietzsche's book of philosophical parables, ''Also Sprach Zarathustra.'' Mahler considered naming his brooding Third Symphony for a Nietzsche book. Freud was uncomfortably anxious about Nietzsche's primacy. Jung devoted a four-year seminar to his writings. Thomas Mann in 1947 described Nietzsche as ''a phenomenon of vast cultural scope and complexity, a veritable résumé of the European spirit.''

That résumé was sullied by Nietzsche's sister, who, after he became incapacitated, promoted Nietzsche as a nationalist proto-Fascist visionary. In World War I the German government distributed 150,000 copies of Nietzsche's imperious ''Zarathustra'' to its soldiers along with copies of Goethe's ''Faust'' and the New Testament. Later Hitler paid homage to his memory, and Nietzsche seemed to become the state philosopher of the Third Reich.

But after World War II, Nietzsche's ideas also inspired the European left, including Marxist theoreticians interested in examining how ideas become instruments of power, one of Nietzsche's themes. Nietzsche's most famous recent epigone may have been the French philosopher Michel Foucault; his most famous recent opponent may have been the American political philosopher Allan Bloom.

Contemporary arguments supporting cultural relativism still use ideas of Nietzsche's. We have had Nietzsche the Fascist, Nietzsche the Freudian, Nietzsche the Existentialist, Nietzsche the Countercultural Psychologist and Nietzsche the Premodernist Postmodernist. Now we have Nietzsche the homosexual and perhaps in time something else.